Well, on balance, ‘No’, though it does have a few good bits. Why do I say this? Because (a) there’s much too much emphasis on wastewater treatment (and mostly on constructed wetlands, as might be expected with Professors Brix and Koottatep as contributing authors); (b) there’s far too little emphasis on wastewater collection – simplified sewerage is mentioned, but not correctly (Figure 3-3 is labelled “A simplified sewerage system”, but it shows a settled sewerage system; Figure 3-4 is better: it correctly shows a “condominium sewerage system”); and (c) there’s nothing on design.

ASCE Press says the book “will urge practitioners, decision makers, and researchers to approach these systems in new ways that are practical, innovative, and − best of all − sustainable.” I don’t think so. I think they’ll all end up very confused.

Saturday, 8 May 2010

Many people in Africa depend on groundwater, but exploiting it effectively depends on accurate information about where to find it – and this information is expensive to obtain. Yet in many cases, researchers did the work years ago – it's just a matter of tracking down their results. Jude Cobbing and Jeff Davies describe a new initiative to make data from old studies more accessible – and in doing so, improve scientific cooperation and the availability of water in Africa.

Many people (students in particular) think useful data have to come from recent sources – they have to be available on the Internet, otherwise they ain’t much use. So an initiative like this, to get “old” knowledge on the Internet, is very welcome. After all, reinventing wheels is expensive and a massive waste of time.

This article is about groundwater, but in sanitation there’s also lots of good “old” knowledge (some of which is on the Internet) which many of today’s professionals (never mind students) simply don’t know about. So they reinvent some wheels – e.g., sanitation planning tools, latrine designs, and so on. Time to get real!

* Planet Earth is a free magazine published by NERC (the UK Natural Environment Research Council) and aimed at non-specialists with an interest in environmental science.

“ITT employees and water supporters rallied together to support ITT Watermark’s nonprofit partners, adding 4,486 fans to the ITT Watermark Facebook page in just one week and raising US$ 4,486 through ITT’s commitment to donate $1 to safe water solutions for every new fan between March 22 and 26 in honor of World Water Day” – see blog of 19 March. Well done, ITT!

“Worldwide, the equivalent of almost 270,000 trees is either flushed or dumped in landfills every day and roughly 10 percent of that total is attributable to toilet paper”, says Noelle Robbins in the May/June issue of World Watch Magazine. That’s flushing down toilets nearly 10 million trees a year! It certainly makes you think.

About Me

I'm an emeritus professor of civil engineering at the University of Leeds in England. I've been working on low-cost sanitation in developing countries since the mid-1970s, and also on low-cost wastewater treatment and reuse. I was a lecturer at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, 1970-73 and then a senior lecturer at the University of Dundee, Scotland, 1974-79 before moving to Leeds in late 1979. I was a visiting professor of sanitary engineering at the Universidade Federal da Paraiba in Campina Grande, northeast Brazil, during 1976-95, and since 1996 I have been a visiting professor of environmental engineering at the Instituto Cinara, Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia.